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Asking For Revolution

March 15, 2010 by Rob Waterson

“All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.”

Someone has to say this and it may as well be a perennial rabble-rouser like me.

In the Declaration of Independence, the founding fathers made it clear that the federal government was to be subservient to the people.  More specifically, they made the strong statement that legitimate government gets its just powers from the people themselves.  Furthermore, that incredible document states that if the government gets out of control and begins overstepping that consent, it is the right (and I would further submit, the inherent duty) of the American people to discard that government and replace it with something more supportive of their liberty.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

It is immensely important not to romanticize such things.  If our government goes too far in its subjugation of the people and their unalienable rights, and the people decide to abolish it, we have no idea what we are going to end up with.  Clearly the framers felt this way as well:

Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

This is not simply a matter of the statist triad of Obama, Pelosi, and Reid passing legislation with which I disagree.  George W. Bush and the GOP congress passed legislation with which I strenuously disagreed.  Elections do have consequences, and the fact that the charlatan candidate Obama used deception and campaign donation fraud to get elected does not change that fact.  When it comes to passing legislation, however, the methods do matter and ignoring the will of the People is not something to be disregarded.  Haughtily dismissing what the public thinks about ObamaCare, cutting back-room deals like the Louisiana Purchase, the Cornhusker Kickback, and the exemption for the Bolshevik labor unions (i.e. bribery with our money), and attempting to bypass historical and constitutional parliamentary rules and precedents in order to pass unpopular and inherently unconstitutional legislation is beyond the pale.  It is most certainly not simply politics as usual.  Nancy Pelosi, that hollow-eyed hippie from San Francisco, even admitted that we have to pass this legislation “to find out what is in it.”  These people do not care about what is in the bill, nor do they care about the health care options available to Americans.  They simply seek the power that comes from dependency-based control of the proles.

Just when we thought that we had seen the Democrats sink as low as any group of statists has in the history of the Republic, they have outdone themselves.  If you are unfamiliar with the egregiously unconstitutional “Slaughter Solution”, you need to go read about it here right now.  Then come back.  You should be really angry now.  If not, you are reading the wrong blog.

The gist of the Slaughter Solution is the notion that they will claim that the House passed the Senate bill without ever voting on it.  Yes, you read that correctly.  From the article linked above in The Daily Caller:

The statist junta running our country was more than willing to push through its socialized medicine takeover in the face of consistent public opposition.  They simply do not care what the people want when it conflicts with their insatiable appetite for control over every aspect of our lives.  Even the voters in the very blue state of Massachusetts firmly voted against ObamaCare when they elected Scott Brown to the Senate in a special election.  Those of us who oppose the ObamaCare takeover rejoiced over Brown’s victory, naively thinking that we could finally stop this attack on our rights and our Constitution.  However, stunning even those of us who already knew the immense distain that they have for our history and our Constitution, the Democrats have proven that they see our Constitution as something that they would like to perforate into small squares and hang on a roller in their bathrooms.

I submit that pushing through a takeover of our health care system – one-sixth of the US economy – using these unprecedented and now inarguably unconstitutional methods when polls show that a majority of Americans reject it is tantamount to a “soft overthrow” of our system from within.  This is not just another regulation telling us how much water we can use in our toilets.  This is a fundamental change to the historical appropriate relationship between the State and the People.  ObamaCare in and of itself is, as Mark Levin states regularly, a soft tyranny.  The so-called Slaughter Solution clearly removes the adjective “soft” from that calculus.

Being a patriotic American, and concerned with my own self-preservation, I am hesitant to say this.  But like so many of us out here in flyover country, I am not one to meekly accept abuse and soft-tyranny and I find myself thinking about a quote that I discovered in my years of martial arts obsession: it is better to die on your feet than live on your knees.

The Democrats are asking for a revolution.  THAT’S RIGHT I SAID IT!  If they pass this statist takeover of our lives and health using such inherently tyrannical, dishonest, and unconstitutional methods, we must commit ourselves to massive civil disobedience.  But we will have to stick together and in the words of the great Margaret Thatcher, we must not “go wobbly” .

“We must, indeed, all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately.”  -  Benjamin Franklin, just before signing the Declaration of Independence, 1776.

I opened this blog post with Edmund Burke’s timeless observation that the only thing required for evil to be victorious is that “good men do nothing.”  Where do you stand?

Posted in Activism, Government Corruption, Socialist Politicians | Tagged , , , , , , | 3 Comments »

Required Reading For Arguing With Statists

March 11, 2010 by Rob Waterson

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Barack Obama: Poverty Pimp

March 10, 2010 by Rob Waterson

[Hat tip to Mark Levin for this story]

Writing in NRO, the well respected Robert Rector describes fundamental changes to the way that the government will measure poverty in America.  The current method of measuring poverty deals with purchasing power (“how much steak and potatoes you can buy”) whereas the new measure will  “count comparative purchasing power — how much steak and potatoes you can buy relative to other people.”

The weird new poverty measure will produce very odd results. For example, if the real income of every single American were to magically triple over night, the new poverty measure would show there had been no drop in “poverty,” because the poverty income threshold would also triple. Under the Obama system, poverty can be reduced only if the incomes of the “poor” are rising faster than the incomes of everyone else.

Another paradox of the new poverty measure is that countries such as Bangladesh and Albania will have lower poverty rates than the United States, even though the actual living conditions in those countries are extremely bad. Haiti would probably have a very low poverty rate when measured by the Obama system because the earthquake reduced much of the population to a uniform penniless squalor.

This change is nothing less than a move to ensure that regardless of any economic realities or statistics there will always be a fixed percentage of Americans living in so-called poverty.  I argue that by world standards there is very little poverty in America.  I am reminded of an anecdotal story told by Dinesh D’Souza in his book What’s So Great About America.  He was listening to an immigrant talk about America, including some criticisms of racism and other problems.  D’Souza asked the individual why he wanted to come to America when he knew of all of these perceived problems and without missing a beat the guy said “I want to live in a country where the poor people are fat.”  Rector provides a similar argument:

What has the Obama measure to do with actual poverty? Not much. For most Americans, the word “poverty” suggests destitution: an inability to provide a family with nutritious food, clothing, and reasonable shelter. But only a small number of the 40 million per­sons classified as poor under the government’s current poverty definition fit that description. Most of America’s poor live in material conditions that would have been judged comfortable, or even well-off, two generations ago.

The government’s own data show that the typical American defined as poor (according to the traditional, pre-Obama poverty measure) has two color televisions, cable or satellite service, a VCR or DVD player, and a stereo. He also has a car, air conditioning, a refrig­erator, a stove, a clothes washer and dryer, and a microwave. He is able to obtain medical care. His home is in good repair and is not overcrowded. By his own report, his family is not hungry, and he had suf­ficient funds in the past year to meet his family’s essential needs. While this individual’s life is not opulent, it is far from the stark images conveyed by the mainstream media and liberal politicians.

So if this is not about genuine poverty, what is this all about?  I think that you already know.  It is about justification for income redistribution, the main raison d’etre of the American Left.

In honest English, the new system will measure income inequality, not poverty. Why not just call it an “inequality” index? Answer: because the American voter is unwilling to support massive welfare increases, soaring deficits, and tax increases to equalize incomes. However, if the goal of income leveling is camouflaged as a desperate struggle against poverty, hunger, and dire deprivation, then the political prospects improve. The new measure is a public-relations Trojan horse, smuggling in a “spread the wealth” agenda under the ruse of fighting real material privation — a condition that is rare in our society.

Barack Obama is a poverty pimp, but because there is not enough poverty in America to justify his rhetoric he has to warp the measurement scale.  Rector correctly concludes that “the new poverty measure will use deception to promote a much larger welfare state.”

Would you expect anything less from an empty suit community activist?

Posted in Dishonest Politicians, Socialist Politicians | Tagged , , , , , , | 1 Comment »

Liberalism: Immoral, Not Just Wrong

March 8, 2010 by Rob Waterson

In these challenging economic and political times, it is easy to get overwhelmed by the volume of new proposals and the accompanying focus group tested disinformation campaigns.  People often get so caught up in arguing the details of a program or slew of new entitlements that they can no longer see the big picture.  The result of arguing policy instead of principle in this manner is that too many of us simply cannot see the forest because of all the trees.  This level of granularity in the policy arguments is exactly what the statists in government want.  In fact, they love to keep the proles busy arguing over false choices.  It keeps them in power.  While we stay busy arguing the details we do not notice that we are becoming serfs.

The title of this post makes the provocative statement that liberalism is not simply wrong, it is inherently immoral.  To examine this argument we must first define some terms.

Though they are often lumped in with each other as the same thing, the fact is that liberals and democrats are not necessarily the same thing.   Liberalism is a freedom-loathing philosophy, whereas the Democrat party is simply the vehicle that statists use in an attempt to force their flawed anti-freedom agenda on the rest of America.  It is very important to note that liberalism is not different in kind from the other slave-to-the-state “isms”.  It is simply different in degree.  Liberalism shares an anti-individual agenda with its cousins of socialism, collectivism, Marxism, Maoism, etc.  It is simply a watered down version of statism that the left feels is palatable enough to ease otherwise freedom-loving Americans into living under a soft tyranny.  All of these anti-freedom ideologies, including rank and file liberalism, involve a reverence for centralized control that is anathema to historical American freedoms.

As many have noted, and Mark Levin so eloquently pointed out in his fantastic book, the best umbrella term to use when describing all of these immoral leftist “isms” is statism.  Statists (when I use that term I absolutely include people like the President and every single member of his party in Congress) believe that you are not a free individual but are instead owned by the State.  Virtually all of their harmful entitlement programs and wealth redistribution schemes are premised on an un-American and unconstitutional view of the appropriate relationship between the government and the individual.  One simply cannot believe that the government has the power to take over your health care choices, even forcing you to purchase health insurance under penalty of law, without accepting the implicit premise that we are all just livestock living on the government collective.  In the eyes of Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi, you are just another cow living on the government farm and you will be milked according to the whims of nameless, faceless statist bureaucrats who genuinely believe that they know better than you.  Even worse, they do not give a rodent’s posterior about the people they claim to represent.  They simply seek the power that flows from increased government dependency.  Does anyone really believe that Barack Obama cares about the quality of any American’s health care?  If you do, you are simply a naïve, Kool Aid drinking myrmidon… or a loser who just wants someone else to subsidize your lifestyle.  In either case, this quote from Sam Adams is for you:

If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude than the animated contest of freedom, go from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains sit lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen!  – Samuel Adams

In a rather long post that I wrote last fall titled On Taxes and Socialism, I put it this way:

I mentioned earlier that I believe collectivism to be inherently immoral regardless of the results of an implementation of that system.  Churchill once said that “the inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of misery.”  In practice these results have proven to be true time and time again.  To Churchill’s first point, we will always have an unequal sharing of “blessings” when those blessings are based upon a free market meritocratic system, but we also always have incredible opportunity to better ourselves.  But Churchill’s second point properly points out that the results of socialism are better for a few people at the expense of everyone else.  In this sense collectivism is immoral because it turns the entire system upside down, structuring things to be best for and most conducive to the needs of the least productive, least successful, and all too often least ambitious among us.   Often lost in the debate is the sad fact that often the mere reality of government involvement results in a worse situation for all involved, including the unavoidable creation of less ambitious people with no incentive to work harder.

Socialism is immoral because at its core, once you strip away the camouflage of false compassion, it requires an acceptance that the government owns you, that when the rubber hits the road you are simply a number, and that if you are more productive than most other people you will be regarded as a cash cow to be milked for what some group of statists considers The Common Good.  You can dress that up in the “party dress” of alleged compassion but it remains un-American and immoral.

Statism (i.e. liberalism) is immoral.  Independent of debates on spending or the size of government or even Constitutionality, statism is inherently anti-freedom and anti-American.  I know not what course others may take; but as for me I choose to fight these statist elitists, their myrmidons, and their immoral slavery to the state until the end.  To do anything less would be cowardly, un-American, and a slap in the face to the people throughout our history who laid down their lives for the idea that is America.

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Visualizing the National Debt

March 5, 2010 by Rob Waterson

BillShrink has an interesting and informative visualization of the National Debt (i.e. Obama’s credit card in our names).  Click on the image to see it in a larger format over at BillShrink:

Posted in Economics | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Coincidence or Corruption?

March 4, 2010 by Rob Waterson

This should be an outrage to every American who opposes corruption in government.  Just a couple of hours before the White House was to host 10 House Democrats who voted against ObamaCare, President Obama nominated the brother of one of the holdouts to be a federal appeals court judge.  Writing in the Weekly Standard, John McCormack exposes this new brazen attempt to sway the votes of opponents of the House Bill:

So, Scott Matheson appears to have the credentials to be a judge, but was his nomination used to buy off his brother’s vote?

Consider Congressman Matheson’s record on the health care bill. He voted against the bill in the Energy and Commerce Committee back in July and again when it passed the House in November. But now he’s “undecided” on ramming the bill through Congress. “The Congressman is looking for development of bipartisan consensus,” Matheson’s press secretary Alyson Heyrend wrote to THE WEEKLY STANDARD on February 22. “It’s too early to know if that will occur.” Asked if one could infer that if no Republican votes in favor of the bill (i.e. if a bipartisan consensus is not reached) then Rep. Matheson would vote no, Heyrend replied: “I would not infer anything.  I’d wait to see what develops, starting with the health care summit on Thursday.”

The timing of this nomination looks suspicious, especially in light of Democratic Congressman Joe Sestak’s claim that he was offered a federal job not to run against Arlen Specter in the Pennsylvania primary. Many speculated that Sestak, a former admiral, was offered the Secretary of the Navy job.

Obama and his henchmen are corrupt Chicago thugs (which is odd given that they are a gaggle of beta males) who will stop at nothing to seize more control over the lives of Americans.

In the video below from Larry King Live, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) calls for an independent investigation while pointing out that this is just the latest in a line of underhanded deals wielded by a corrupt Democrat Party in their increasingly brazen attempt to ram their unpopular statist health care agenda down the throats of an angry citizenry.

We really need to have a independent investigation into this matter because we have seen the Cornhusker Kickback, the Louisiana Purchase, the Union Loophole, and now the big question is is the White House trading health care votes for judgeships?  This is a pretty serious issue, Larry.

Rep. Alan Grayson (D-FL) responds like the Kool Aid drinking one termer that he is, calling it simply a “distraction” and a ”tangent”.  I wonder if Mr. Grayson would have given the previous occupant of the White House the same benefit of the doubt?

Responding to Grayson’s trite dismissal of this as a “tangent”, Ed Morrissey over at Hot Air had this to say:

Besides, which candidate for President promised to change the way Washington works?  Which candidate promised “Hope and Change,” and a new era of transparency?  Which political party promised in 2006 to provide “Open, Honest Government”?  Those weren’t “tangents” in 2006 or 2008.
That being said, the likelihood of an independent probe into this is about the same as Barack Obama suddenly announcing that he’s converted to supply-side economics and proposing the elimination of the Department of Education.  The Department of Justice under Eric Holder will treat it with the same urgency as voter-intimidation tactics in Philadelphia, and the current Congress will get right on this obvious bribe immediately after looking into Nancy Pelosi’s power grab on Ways and Means.
I will say this: if Rep. Matheson changes his vote, which was against health care both in committee and in the full House vote, this will stand as a clear example of a corrupt quid quo pro bribe.  We will all be watching, congressman.

Posted in Dishonest Politicians, Government Corruption | Tagged , , , , , , | 1 Comment »

Counterintuitive Thoughts on 2010

March 4, 2010 by Rob Waterson

In the short video interview embedded below Scott Rasmussen estimates that in the 2010 elections the GOP will pick up 5 to 8 seats in the Senate and 25 to 30 seats in the House, which would result in the Democrats retaining control of both chambers.  Though I think that the carnage inflicted on the Party of Slavery to the State will be even worse than that, he points out the obvious fact that a good economy in October could help the Democrats.  As I mentioned recently, some economists do argue that 2010 may be the best economic year of Obama’s presidency and even a temporary upturn could help stem some of the heavy losses expected to be inflicted on the Democrats in November.  Conversely, if the jobs picture in October looks more like today the GOP could indeed take the House and get close to taking the Senate.  Interestingly, Rasmussen points out almost in passing that the GOP might not want to be in control of Congress heading into 2012.  He has a real point.

There is no doubt that wresting control of Congress away from these power-drunk government-loving statists will clearly be a good thing, and no sane person would suggest anything less than a full-bore attempt to win every possible seat.  Frankly, the future of the Republic depends on it.  But perhaps simply being close enough to a 50/50 split would be a better long-term result for the GOP as long as they can still obstruct the statist agenda of Obama and his minions.  While controlling at least one half of Congress would go a long way toward stopping Comrade Obama’s frantic rush toward socialism, let’s not forget that undoing the damage done by this administration is going to require control of the White House.  Even a lame duck Obama wields a difficult-to-override veto and there is no chance of gaining a two-thirds majority of both houses in 2010.  Our primary goal is to remove the most radical President in US history from office after one term, and being the minority party in 2012 would allow the GOP to adopt a different position as complete outsiders.

Rasmussen makes some other points about Evan Bayh’s retirement and the Scott Brown election that are worth watching as well.  But his point about the strategy of remaining the minority party has some real merit.  The perfect solution would be a 50/50 split in the Senate, which would give the dumbest man in politics something to do, and perhaps being down only a vote or two in the House would suffice.  A second term for the least qualified, most radical President in history would likely be the death knell of American Exceptionalism and may also be the final nail in the statist-built coffin for the American Experiment, a liberty first philosophy in which the freedom-loathing Mr. Obama simply does not believe.

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Political Skepticism

February 19, 2010 by Rob Waterson

I found a short post over at Skepticblog in which Michael Shermer simply attempts to demonstrate that the number 3.8 trillion is an almost inconceivably large number.  You have probably already recognized that particular number as the size, in dollars, of President Obama’s proposed budget.  Not surprisingly, that did not go unnoticed among the respondents in the comments section who immediately criticized Shermer.  Some felt that the post may not belong on the skeptical site, which is fair, but the very first commenter opined that “in this case your politics appear to be getting in the way and this is sounding like a personal blog”, while another inexplicably referred to the post as “Obama bashing”.  As always there are some very interesting comments from both sides of the argument but two interesting things come to mind from these responses to Shermer’s completely apolitical post.

First, it is illuminating that simply utilizing analogies to demonstrate how large a number is has some reactionaries on the Left up in arms.  Though Shermer does point out that the large number being discussed is the size of the President’s proposed budget, he does not get political at all.   At worst all he does is some math to show how much this spending would end up costing each American.  Too many of these alleged skeptics are letting the emotions of their politics cloud their vision.

Second, the responses illustrate once again that too many skeptics tend to suspend their skepticism when it comes to government, a phenomenon that I previously noted in a post about ClimateGate.  A commenter named Daniel put it very well:

I’ve often puzzled over the tendency of atheists, scientists, and skeptics to lean left. Maybe it’s simply a knee-jerk reaction to the sheer ignorance and stupidity displayed by the right. Whatever the case, I’ve noticed that most skeptics are NOT skeptical when it comes to politics- in fact, they seem to me to be even more gullible than their Neanderthalic, creationist, anti-gay counterparts on the right. For example, anyone who has read P.Z. Meyers’ blog will immediately notice that he is not the least skeptical of government bureaucrats or central planners. Shermer is a rarity- a libertarian skeptic, someone who’s not afraid to turn a skeptical, scientific eye on government planners.

This particular blog [post] is simply him to trying to put in perspective the gargantuan size of the Leviathan state, but I’m far more interested in the backlash he gets for simply by trying to comprehend the sheer scope and waste of government in America today.

There’s no reason why skepticism should stop at foot of Capitol Hill, any more than skepticism should stop at the threshold of churches and mosques.

For those of you who may be unfamiliar with Michael Shermer, I recommend an interesting post called The Other ‘L’ Word: Why I am a Libertarian.  If you have some time on your hands, you can read his much longer but very thoughtful post titled How I Became a Libertarian.  He starts the “L word” post with this:

In a nutshell, I am a libertarian because conservatives are a bunch of gun-toting, Hummer-driving, hard-drinking, Bible-thumping, black-and-white-thinking, fist-pounding, shoe-stomping, morally-hypocritical blowhards, and liberals are a bunch of tree-hugging, whale-saving, hybrid-driving, sandle-wearing, bottled-water-drinking, ACLU-supporting, flip-flopping, wishy-washy, Namby Pamby bedwetters. There’s a better way. Libertarianism.

As consistent as skeptics like to be, liberal skeptics have not yet figured out how to shine their logical skepticism on politics.  It perplexes me.

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Progressives and Willful Historical Ignorance

February 16, 2010 by Rob Waterson

Hat tip to Dan Riehl for initially pointing me to this news story via Twitter.  You can follow Dan on Twitter here.

Proposed changes to the North Carolina high school history curriculum have many people upset with critics correctly pointing out that the state is simply cutting out the first half of U.S. History.

This article on the Charlotte NBC affiliate’s web site includes the video of their news story on the controversy and gives a good synopsis of the controversy.

One quote from Rebecca Garland, the chief academic officer for the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction, really rubbed me the wrong way.  From an article at FoxNews:

We are certainly not trying to go away from American history.  What we are trying to do is figure out a way to teach it where students are connected to it, where they see the big idea, where they are able to make connections and draw relationships between parts of our history and the present day.

The changes being considered would apply to eleventh graders in the state, who currently study American history beginning with the nation’s founding.  Garland would seem to prefer that this “big idea” understanding of America and why it is special be formed by constraining the young people of North Carolina to examining the second, far more statist half of our nation’s history.  Educators are actually hurting their students and their country when they mislead our young people into believing that the Big Idea of America has something to do with labor unions or progressivism or redistributing wealth or the ideas of Fabian socialists like Wilson, FDR, or Obama.  In fact, the most important concepts of American history are the founding ideals, and the key to understanding American Exceptionalism is in knowing enough about our history and our founding principles to realize how special this country truly is.

Remember that many of these eleventh graders will soon be off to face progressive (Marxist) professors who seem to hate everything about America except their own cushy and often subsidized academic positions.  Authority figures like that are all too often a part of what Mark Levin correctly labels the counter revolution, with goals and ideologies that are diametrically opposed to our founding principles.  Knowing that today’s high school students will be facing off against this bevy of Ward Churchill types tomorrow, we should instead be teaching the incredible historical significance of the revolution on which our country is based.  It is vitally important to stress that the American Revolution was not simply a revolution against English rule.  It was a revolution against the idea that people were subjects at all.  It was a revolution against a long-standing and almost unbroken world acceptance of an inappropriate relationship between the State and the Individual.  If students have only one take-away from US History it should be that simple fact.  Many have correctly argued that the American Revolution was not truly complete until the abolition of slavery in 1865, and even that part of America’s history would be left out of the proposed curriculum.

An article by the Heritage Foundation argues that this history-finagling is SOP for the Progressives:

Early 20th century Progressives also taught that nothing before 1877 has meaning for today. In his new book We Still Hold These Truths: Rediscovering Our Principles, Reclaiming Our Future, Matthew Spalding recounts Progressives attack on America’s First Principles. The Progressives sought to remake America, so that the Declaration’s Founding Principles, the Constitution’s institutional structures, and the Civil War’s meaning as a victory for Founding principles would no longer ring true. The progressives argued that equal, natural rights were non-existent; government creates rights. They replaced representative government with the administrative, bureaucratic state.

There is no reason to believe that Ms. Garland or any others in the education establishment in North Carolina are part of a Progressive conspiracy to create adults without a deep appreciation for the Founding Principles.  The unfortunate case is that in many cases liberal thinking seems to naturally, even if unintentionally, flow in the direction of results that are favorable to those who seek to redefine our country and in many cases reject its traditions and institutions.  Whether sinister or just misguided, these proposed curriculum changes would force formative North Carolina students to build their perspectives of America – and their understanding of what makes America special – on a skewed view of America in which progress is presented as acceptance of Fabian socialist ideals and exponential increases in government involvement in the lives of individuals.

The potential changes involve more than just compartmentalizing the first half of American history out of the North Carolina high school curriculum.  As the FoxNews article points out, rather than studying world history ninth-graders would instead pursue something called global studies which would focus “in part on issues such as the environment”.  In a real sense this change seems to be an even wider version of the accompanying changes to the American history curriculum for eleventh graders.  An appreciation of what makes the American experiment so special requires an understanding of the historical evolution of the country’s founding and the principles underlying its formation.  Similarly, an educated understanding of the significance of western civilization requires a study of the history of the Greeks and the Romans and the British and their interactions with the other powers in their respective times.  Though I have not been able to locate details about this potential change to the world history classes, the fact that the name of the class would change from World History to Global Studies suggests that North Carolina’s ninth graders are not going to be learning of Pericles or Hannibal or William the Conqueror.  No, Global Studies sounds a little more… squishy.

In order for America to stay special, Americans have to know why they are special.  Anything that seeks to undermine the teaching and appreciation of the American founding is a threat to the American Experiment.  In fact, there should be an entire class on the American Founding including the Articles of Confederation and how its failures led to our incredible Constitution.  That would certainly prepare our young people to go defend their country against the counter revolutionaries that we inexplicably permit to mold the minds of our college students.

On a positive note, at least one elected official in North Carolina has said that the state legislature will step in if the state board decides to implement these changes.

Posted in History | Tagged , , , , , , | 19 Comments »

Keynesian Ideology and the Coming Crash

February 12, 2010 by Rob Waterson

In an article at The American Spectator titled The Coming Crash of 2011, Peter Ferrara points out the historical failure of Keynesian governmental intrusion into the free market and contrasts the observed and expected results of Obama’s ideological policies with the known results of President Reagan’s markedly different approach.

Bad economic policies can throw economies into downturns, and delay recoveries. Keynesian economics and rising effective tax rates produced four worsening inflation/recession cycles in and around the 1970s: 1969-1970, 1973-1974, 1979-1980, and 1982.

But Reaganomics was so successful that it all but abolished the business cycle for a generation. The economy took off at the end of 1982 on a 25-year economic boom interrupted by only two, short, shallow recessions in 1990-1991 and 2001. That is why today we no longer recognize the natural workings of the business cycle.

He makes a good point.  Several years ago, well before our current government-caused financial crisis, it dawned on me that I was incredibly lucky to have lived my entire adult life in such comfortable and successful times.  Most people have indeed forgotten that there is a natural business cycle.

The slow and weak recovery from the recession, which has lasted almost two years (a postwar record), shows yet again the failure of Keynesian economics, continuing a long, unbroken record of failure stretching back to the 1930s.

But the Obama Administration came into office knowing that the economy would ultimately recover as the business cycle turned up naturally, and planned to reap the political credit, enabling still greater leaps of neo-socialism. Internally, they are surprised and miffed that it has taken so long, not understanding that their own, blindly anti-market policies only delayed recovery.

Virtually every economic decision made by Mr. Obama since the start of his presidency has perplexed me.  Admittedly, by late 2008 it was obvious to me who this character was and I fully expected him to govern like a naïve leftist, at least initially.  But having witnessed a few of these cycles I also predicted that the self-preservation that often springs from plunging approval ratings would force some economic pragmatism reminiscent of Bill Clinton’s triangulations in the mid-nineties.  However, this President’s ideologically based proposals seem so clearly bad for the economic outlook that I am left with only two choices for explanations.  Either they really are that clueless about economics or their ideology simply trumps it.  Neither of those scenarios bode well for Americans, particularly the future generations about whom today’s liberals seem so coldly unconcerned.

Quoting Art Laffer (of Laffer Curve fame), the author makes the argument that 2010 will be the best economic year of President Obama’s reign.  First, there is a natural bounce-back that can be expected after this deep a fall.  Combined with the effects, albeit short term, of the massive monetary expansion by the Federal Reserve and an artificial heightened productivity resulting from an attempt to beat the tax increases of 2011 this should cause a bubble of growth in 2010.

But Laffer ominously continues that “when the U.S. economy comes to 2011, the train’s going to come off the tracks.”  He argues that the effect of the massive monetary expansion by the Fed will be “petering out” and points out that changes to tax policy are going to contribute to this economic stagnation and collapse:

“And we haven’t even begun to talk about the tax rate increases of 2011. These purely ideological abuses of economic policy will end up punishing working people nationwide. The top income tax rate is scheduled to increase by close to 20%, the capital gains tax rate by at least 33%, and the top dividends tax rate by 164%. Further tax increases in the pending health care legislation would raise these tax rates still more.”

The article’s author closes with this assessment:

Again, just the opposite of the long-term economic boom that followed the 1982 downturn when Reagan first slayed inflation, the flowering of growth in Obama’s second year will be followed by long-term stagnation and economic decline for America, slaying the American Dream, until President Obama’s neo-socialist economic policies are reversed.

I think that the writing is already on the wall for the November 2010 elections.  It will almost certainly be a disaster for the Democrats.  If Laffer’s dismal economic forecast is accurate, the 2012 elections could be an epic landslide reflecting an outright rejection of the American left’s love affair with Big Government Keynesianism.

Now enjoy this enjoyably funny video of “Keynes and Hayek” rapping about their conflicting economic theories.

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